Previous KBWEB Consult articles have discussed how features such as experience fragments can support business needs for omnichannel personalization.

This article returns to the topic of rapid omnichannel personalization. The article focuses on the Dynamic Media features in Adobe Experience Manager (AEM). Tight integration of AEM Dynamic Media with AEM Assets and AEM Sites increases content velocity by allowing rapid creation of personalized, consistent content across all channels—provide that it is implemented correctly.

What is the chief challenge to implementing omnichannel personalization?

In today’s markets, one size no longer fits all. As noted in a previous KBWEB Consult article, a business may need to create millions of pieces of content, including specific types of assets for each product in each region, addressing each audience/persona. It is difficult to create millions of pieces of personalized content.

To add to this complexity, firms must provide this content as text, images, video, and other disparate formats. These different types of content are needed to support the channels that prospects and customers use. And these content types have their own specific needs. As Adobe notes:

File size has historically been one of the biggest bottlenecks for ensuring the smooth delivery of immersive experiences. Each device and channel has its own specifications, which means if you want your rich media to be viewed the way you designed it, every experience has to be adapted for every platform. It’s exhausting just thinking about the effort required. 

From Adobe’s Dynamic Media page

This need for adaptation, coupled with the large size of immersive media files, means that omnichannel personalization could require extensive manual edits to implement. This could take so much time that the information may become obsolete.

Unless there were a way to accelerate the process.

Enter AEM Dynamic Media

AEM Dynamic Media accelerates omnichannel personalization, ensuring your business messages are presented quickly and in the proper formats. Starting with a master file, Dynamic Media quickly adjusts images and videos to satisfy varying asset specifications, contributing to increased content velocity. Dyamic Media is designed for rapid delivery:

Dynamic Media…is fundamentally different from other systems because you use it to deliver your media dynamically from single, primary assets, and from URL calls. The Dynamic Media URL paths that you request include instructions that tell the Adobe publish server how to display the asset when it is delivered to a customer’s screen. For example, using the same single primary asset, you can have it delivered instantly in unlimited renditions, changing size, format, resolution, weight, color, crop, and effects such as a zoom view.

This unique delivery method ensures that consistent quality experiences are sent to any screen, regardless of size or bandwidth. Full-size videos are also optimized for all screen types and adaptively streamed to also ensure a consistent, quality user experience.

From “Dynamic Media Journey: The Basics, Part I.”

At the same time, delivered image file sizes are minimized by up to 70 percent to conform to the available bandwidth and device type. This quick loading helps to drive conversion.

Implementation considerations

While Dynamic Media itself is easy to use once implemented, businesses need to ensure that their data is optimized to employ Dynamic Media

Arrange content as experience fragments

The secret to ensuring consistent messaging across all channels is to arrange content as experience fragments. As a previous article stated:

AEM uses experience fragments to support omnichannel marketing. In AEM, an experience fragment is a group of components that can be referenced within pages. When the experience fragment is edited, that edit is carried over to all locations in which the experience fragment is used. Experience fragments can be used both on formatted pages managed directly by AEM, and on non-formatted headless content managed by third-party applications. This ensures that you can provide a common marketing message on your web pages, emails, chatbots, and all content.

From KBWEB Consult’s “3 proven ways to get the most out of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM)“

As the experience fragements are incorporated into your business messaging, Dynamic Media ensures that the customer-facing content is presented in the appropriate formats.

Other AEM Assets considerations

To speed your content creation, Adobe strongly recommends that you implement tags via a structured taxonomy. While your assets can incorporate various types of metadata separate from tags, a well-defined taxonomy of pre-defined tags makes it much easier to associate related assets.

Adobe provides this example of a well-structured taxonomy:

Example: There is a need to subcategorize stock imagery of cars. The taxonomy could look like:

/subject/car/
/subject/car/sportscar
/subject/car/sportscar/porsche
/subject/car/sportscar/ferrari
…
/subject/car/minivan
/subject/car/minivan/mercedes
/subject/car/minivan/volkswagen
…
/subject/car/limousine
…

Now a user can choose whether he wants to look up images of sportscars in general or a “Porsche” in particular. After all, both are sportscars.

From “Taxonomies” in “Tags, Taxonomy, and Metadata Best Practices: High-level Summary“

Design your taxonomy to standardize your tags for all users, avoid the need for constant edits, refrain from over-tagging, and consider the use of artificial intelligence-powered smart tagging.

AEM Sites considerations

When your business integrates Dynamic Media with AEM Assets and AEM Sites, you have a powerful tool to build immersive customer experiences.

Selected AEM image and video core components include built-in support for Dynamic Media. Examples of Dynamic Media image capabilities include:

• Automatic image resizing.
• Smart Crop (discussed here and here).
• Incorporation of image presets.
• Creation of interactive media components.
• Image sharpening.
• Image color management.

Examples of Dynamic Media video capabilities include:

• Video smart crop.
• Interactive video.
• The video player.
• 360 video rendering and media viewers.
• Custom video thumbnails.

Some Dynamic Media capabilities are demonstrated in the 6-minute video on this Adobe page. The video demonstrates how you can use AEM Sites to quickly and easily perform the following:

• Automatically resize image content to fit the width of the page.
• Use image Smart Crop functionality to automatically crop the image to fit the page. For example, Dynamic Media could automatically apply a wide crop/landscape for wider pages, or a vertical crop/portrait for narrower pages.
• Download images with pre-defined image presets (as specified in AEM Tools, Assets). An example of an image preset is a watermark image preset to apply watermarking.
• Create interactive media components by adding interactive targets to images. This allows incorporation of pop-ups to allow a more immersive experience. For example, the pop-ups may be specific SKUs in the AEM Commerce Engine that correspond to products illustrated in the original image.

Who can help you implement AEM Dynamic Media?

As shown above, optimal use of AEM Dynamic Media requires tight integration with other AEM components, including AEM Assets and AEM Sites. Rather than trying to tackle this integration yourself, you can ensure a successful Dynamic Media implementation by working with an Adobe Certified Partner.

KBWEB Consult is a boutique technology consulting firm specializing in the implementation and delivery of AEC technologies, such as AEM Sites and AEM Assets. You can learn more about me and about KBWEB Consult on our About Us page.

Are you already taking advantage of KBWEB Consult’s services? If not, isn’t it time to see what we offer? Schedule a free, confidential 30-minute consultation to learn what KBWEB Consult can (and cannot) do for you. Perhaps we can suggest some ideas about how AEM Dynamic Media can increase your content velocity.

You can book a 30-minute confidential meeting on our Let’s Talk page.